Cry God for Speccie, England and St George!

April 23rd is England's unofficial national holiday - unofficial because, under Blairite devolution, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and selected Muslim neighborhoods of Greater London, Yorkshire and the Midlands are all legitimate nations, but English nationalism is a dark demon that must never be loosed upon the land.

At the turn of the century, Tony Blair's ministry was gung-ho for Celtic semi-independence and pseudo-parliaments in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, but for England all the government was prepared to offer was a subdivision into artificial regions that commanded no allegiance from the masses and could therefore be safely entrusted with "regional assemblies". Even this was abandoned, and in the years after 9/11 English nationalism was further complicated by the fact that, unlike St Andrew, St Patrick and St David, the patron saint of England had a starring role in the new clash of civilizations: St George's was the crusader cross, the banner England's soldiers took across a continent to reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom.

These days the traffic from Islam to Christendom is mostly the other way, and in the multicultural utopia St George is a problematic figure. In the "Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets" â€” the heart of London's East End, where one sees more covered women than in Amman, where male infidel teachers of Muslim girls are routinely assaulted, where police turn a blind eye to misogyny, Jew-hatred, and gay-bashing for fear of being damned as "racist" - I noticed a year or two back that one gay pub had attracted particular ire: patrons were being abused, and beaten, and, in one case, left permanently paralyzed.

The hostelry that had so attracted the attention of the local Muslim youth hung a poignant shingle: The George and Dragon. It's one of the oldest and most popular English pub names. Another George and Dragon just across the Thames on Borough High Street has been serving beer for at least half a millennium. But no one would so designate a public house today. The George and Dragon honors not just England's patron saint but the most famous story about him, brought back by the Crusaders from their soldiering in the Holy Land: In what is now Libya, Saint George supposedly made the Sign of the Cross, slew the dragon, and rescued the damsel.

Within living memory, every English schoolchild knew the tale, if not all the details â€” e.g., the dragon-slaying so impressed the locals that they converted to Christianity. But the multicultural establishment slew the dragon of England's racist colonialist imperialist history, and today few schoolchildren have a clue about Saint George. So that pub in Tower Hamlets turned gay and Britain celebrated diversity, and tolerance, and it never occurred to them that, when you tolerate the avowedly intolerant, it's only an interim phase. There will not be infidel teachers in Tower Hamlets for much longer, nor gay bars.

~For St George's Day, Katie Hopkins reposted a glimpse of the new England from last year's Diwali - a Hindu religious festival being protested by Pakistanis, among whom she was the only female - or, as the young Mohammedans put it, "Zionist bitch":

~In North America, the lockdown seems to be proving the final nail in the coffin of the continent's printed newspapers - and good riddance: aside from the political bias, the average US monodaily is unreadable, a wretched combination of blandness and pomposity; in Canada, the blandness predominates, pomposity being harder to sustain when you're dependent on public subsidies from Justin Trudeau. On this St George's Day, however, a great English institution today celebrates its ten thousandth issue. The Spectator is the oldest continuously published magazine in the English-speaking world, and I'm happy to have played my part in its story for just shy of a thousand of those issues.

Unlike eminent contributors such as John Buchan and Graham Greene, I was there mainly for cheap jokes - such as this, from a review of a 1993 film whose title I forget but whose leading player had adopted an extravagantly Latino accent to the point where he kept barking at people, "Choo bastard!"

To which, I wrote, the only polite response is "Gesundheit, motherf**ker."

Aside from such low-hanging fruit, I happened to be at the Speccie during a particularly shagadelic time at Doughty Street. The tabloids exposed an affair the then editor, Boris Johnson, was having with the deputy editor, Petronella Wyatt. This did not come as a surprise to the then Mrs Johnson, but it did to Boris's secretary, who was also in the throes of passion with him and had foolishly assumed that she was the other woman as opposed to merely the other other woman.

Simultaneously, the magazine's strangely glamorous American publisher, Kimberly Fortier, was conducting her own affair with the wine columnist, Simon Hoggart, and shortly thereafter with Her Britannic Majesty's Home Secretary, a blind man called David Blunkett whose seeing-eye dog got used to leading him straight to Kimberly's love nest. Blunkett wound up resigning from Blair's cabinet, to be replaced by a man called Clarke. As I wrote in The Spectator that week:

I don't know anything about Mr Clarke â€” he hasn't been at the Home Office long enough for any of us at The Spectator to have an affair with him.

In the American media, when your top execs are shagging like minxes all over the gossip columns, a stern memo arrives from some Senior Vice-President of Party-Pooping on the 23rd floor instructing you that on no account are the horizontal mambos of your colleagues to be mentioned even obliquely. I'm glad to have worked for Boris and Kimberly, both of whom took in-house mockery in their stride. Long live The Spectator.

~Almost two decades ago, at the height of Mr Blair's devolution initiative, I wrote a whimsical column for The Daily Telegraph premised on the notion of a St George's Day celebrated like St Patrick's, circa 2050. A lot of topical references - mad cow disease, the then Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine's lavish tastes in taxpayer-funded decor, the Irish Cabinet Minister Hugh Byrne calling England "the leper of Europe", etc - but the gist of it, for a poor suppressed English nationalism, still applies. A small excerpt:

Back then, England was derided as a pox-ridden wasteland infested by simpletons cut off from the mainstream of European civilisation. Comedians mocked them in "English jokes" that to contemporary ears sound shockingly racist:

'An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman stop for lunch at a pub. The Scotsman orders the endive-studded monkfish with a fennel coulis, the Irishman the oyster clafoutis in an aubergine glaze, and the Englishman orders beef on the bone. The waiter says: "Sorry, we don't serve diseased animals." "Okay," says the Englishman, "I'll wait in the car".'

But revisionist scholars now argue that in earlier times England was a great cultural centre, producing many of the world's outstanding scholars and scientists, and that it once enjoyed many of the recognised indicators of civilised society, including primitive units of measurement, its own currency and even a legal system, known as "Common Law", because Lord Irvine found many English solicitors frankly somewhat provincial.

During the meat famine, many English had no choice but to leave their homeland, emigrating to Dublin to take jobs in telephone sales with European car rental firms. But others went to America, where they found they could eke out a living playing psychotic Arab terrorists in Hollywood films.

Etc. English national identity was dormant because for centuries the English assumed theirs to be the default setting - on the same grounds as the oddly profound Ken Dodd joke: "I can't stand the French. They're just jealous of us because we're not foreign." But somewhere Englishness became disapproved of, to the point where a footie fan hanging St George's flag in the window of his council house attracts the attention of the wanker coppers - a terrible transformation wrought while England slept or, in the case of the Speccie, slept around.

~Thank you for your kind words about our recently concluded Tale for Our Time - my serialization of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. If you have a chum who likes classic fiction in audio, why not provide a lockdown perk-up with a gift membership in The Mark Steyn Club? He can while away the house arrest with thrilling capers from the heyday of English fiction including The Prisoner of Zenda, The Time Machine and The Thirty-Nine Steps.

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53 Member Comments

Ray Winchester • Apr 28, 2020 at 10:45

I will not forgive Bliar for the Scottish Government. It has been bordering on Marxism since its inception.They put the taxes up for everyone over Â£26k and managed to raise an extra Â£700 million. They are spending Â£500 million of that on global warming. I wish they would spend it on real warming and not more bird mincers.
Marxist don't realise when they take money out of the real economy it costs us all. We will be subsidising the bird mincers until they fall down.

Nigel Sherratt • Apr 24, 2020 at 16:07

The Scots Parliament (PÃ rlamaid na h-Alba) where 'Wee Nippy' now struts her stuff was described memorably by Billy Connolly as a "wee pretendy parliament". It was budgeted at Â£10 to 40 million (quite enough for a small office building) but finally ended up costing Â£414 million and being three years late. Nobody was held to account. Good enough for government work.

Walt Trimmer • Apr 24, 2020 at 13:21

While it is difficult to see yourself in the mirror, America has vanished as well. The Land of the Free that I grew up in is gone. You have to go out to rural places to find the remnants. Mark once wrote about the 4th of July parade in a small town near him but these parades are fading away. I bet that you couldn't get a God Bless America resolution passed in the House of Representatives today.

James P • Apr 24, 2020 at 09:46

Those of us of English ancestry seem to be about the only ones in America who don't get a hyphen. Tell someone you're English-American and you just get funny looks. My Irish-American wife tells me it's a mild punishment for how badly my ancestors treated hers.

Walt Trimmer James P • Apr 24, 2020 at 13:16

I like to tell people that in our house we only spoke the language of the old country until I was five years old.

Mike Walsh • Apr 24, 2020 at 07:43

Alas, under the current regime, the Spectator has turned to shite. I finally cancelled after reading the umpteenth brain-dead column on US politics that was little more than an excuse for the author to air his TDS.

Wm. P. Mike Walsh • Apr 24, 2020 at 11:15

Spectator UK or Spectator US?

Josh Passell • Apr 24, 2020 at 05:49

Does one have to travel to London and insinuate oneself into an anti-Diwali protest to get called a "Zionist bitch"? Or does wearing a t-shirt and sporting a bumper sticker on one's Subaru qualify one? Along with my membership in the MSC, the ZBC is a club of which I'd be proud to be a member. Oh, and did it occur to these dullard denizens of the Dark Ages that they were casting a shadow over a festival of lights? Or is irony haram in Islam?I note one of the excitable lads is carrying a sign demanding an end to the Indian "occupation" of Kashmir. If the English don't teach English history anymore, do they touch upon history of the subcontinent? Pakistan dates to 1947, India somewhat earlier. It's like demanding the end of English occupation of Brighton. And to wrap things up nicely, let me call for the end of Arab occupation of Moab, Edom, Ammon, and Bashan. I have just enough room left on my bumper for a "Gerroff Gilead!" sticker.

Walt Trimmer Josh Passell • Apr 24, 2020 at 13:46

To be fair, Kashmir has a majority Muslim population and the Indian Hindus are repressive. There was a war over the boundaries at the time of the partition, another war in 1965, during recent fighting there were aircraft shot down and there is perpetual violence on the border. I think this is the mostly likely hot spot for a nuclear exchange in our lifetimes.

Kitty Bits • Apr 24, 2020 at 02:19

The loss of St. George reminds me of the burning of Notre Dame. As their faith fades so does their cultural confidence. The invaders don't have that problem and they smell blood with the natives who believe in nothing so that anything can become a virtue. Why rebuild Notre Dame when no will attend services? Why remember St. George when no one believes in what he stood for?Where is the pride of British manhood to defend Katie Hopkins? It's as absent for her as it has been for the pubescent girls of Telford, Rotherham, and all the other towns and villages where the flower of British maidenhood is assaulted and abused by muslim men.Where is Tommy Robinson? Is he the last man in England who thinks his country is worth fighting for?The muslims will win this battle because they believe in their culture, the believe in their faith. They have convictions they deem worth dying for. The English it appears have none.

John Shuba Kitty Bits • Apr 24, 2020 at 10:33

Sad but true. The final act for a society obsessed with "diversity" and with defending every culture except it's own is for that society to metaphorically put it's head on the block and allow it to be cut off. England may be the first great society to go out of business because of the grotesque sense of guilt engendered by it's elites.

Kitty Bits John Shuba • Apr 27, 2020 at 12:28

John, I've been thinking about this situation since I read Mark's book, America Alone more than a decade ago. I think that trying to remove all of the 'immigrants' from Europe would be impossible at this point. It's my earnest prayer that they all convert to Christianity. It would civilize them. It's the only solution I can think of that would avert blood shed.

ed • Apr 23, 2020 at 20:44

Katie Hopkins is a brave lady!

Thomas Ryan • Apr 23, 2020 at 20:18

"I can't stand the French. They're just jealous of us because we're not foreign."Michael Caine as Austin Powers at his introduction to the nation. " I hate bigotry. And I hate the Dutch".

Paul Nachman • Apr 23, 2020 at 19:48

Mark wrote: "English national identity was dormant because for centuries the English assumed theirs to be the default setting - on the same grounds as the oddly profound Ken Dodd joke: 'I can't stand the French. They're just jealous of us because we're not foreign.'"

This brings to mind a quote from English diplomat Sir Alexander Cadogan that I encountered in the 1975 book _Meeting At Potsdam_: "Don't go abroad. It's a horrible place."

Calvert Whitehurst Paul Nachman • Apr 24, 2020 at 09:02

And yet, in a way, the "English" remain the default setting. The underlying principle of multi-culturalism is to identify ethnic, cultural, linguistic and sexual groups by the degree to which they are not English-speaking, heterosexual men of northern European ancestry.

Calvert Whitehurst Paul Nachman • Apr 24, 2020 at 11:10

I'm reminded of the famous newspaper headline from the 1950's - Fog in Channel: Continent Cut Off.

Martin Jones • Apr 23, 2020 at 18:03

And a very happy St. George's Day to you, Mark. Hilarious joke about the Englishman, Irishman and the Scotsman. But I only got it after looking up the meanings of coulis and clafoutis.

LJO • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:51

It does seem to be peak Englishness for a publication to have a Deputy Editor named Petronella.

In the U. S. "petronella" would be an insect-repellent lawn torch.

Mark replies:

We all called her Petsy, LJ. Surely that's the peak?

LJO LJO • Apr 24, 2020 at 10:43

That's raising the flag* above the peak.

*St. George's Cross, not the Union Jack.

James Morphew • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:43

We in America (some of us) watch England's wandering national identity with fascination and not a small bit of trepidation, as we wonder if we shall follow, or are following, the same decline. And in the last 50 years, decline has been noted, although a bit of respite and recovery were seen when Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street. Which leads us to the larger question: what causes a coherent, proud, moral identity, and what forces bring on the erosion? Seeing Ms. Hopkins harassed on the streets of a formerly very polite country is jarring. We saw something like it here with Antifa, but they were never very storng and seem to be fading, having little culture to bind them.

We can certainly describe the current problems, but the solutions are elusive, at least until the problems grow much more severe and urgent. When they do, I wonder if we will find our strength like England of 1940, or lie down and relax, like France.

Lee Phelps James Morphew • Apr 23, 2020 at 21:06

Don't the folks behind Ms. Hopkins seem to be of a certain non-Christian background? There's a clue. How many years are we behind that?

Kitty Bits James Morphew • Apr 24, 2020 at 00:52

Or lie down and die. France's slow death is accelerating. If the English no longer think their cultural identity worth preserving no one else is going to do it for them.

Diane Oliver Kitty Bits • Apr 24, 2020 at 04:59

As a very small protest I won't accept British, I'm English. On those official forms where there is a choice of 30 or more ethnicities I'm offered White British! I cross it out and write ENGLISH!

Kitty Bits Diane Oliver • Apr 25, 2020 at 00:08

Come to the U.S. if it looks like the ship is truly sinking in the U.K. I'll sponsor you. If America really did take in the best of people from the rest of the world we would continue to be the greatest nation in the world. Having Mark Steyn here is a huge gain for the U.S. I'll happily exchange all of the Somali population in Michigan and Maine for your family and Katie Hopkins and her family and Tommy Robinson and his. A fair trade if ever there was one.

Diane Oliver Kitty Bits • Apr 25, 2020 at 07:46

Thanks Kitty, that's very kind. I don't think it's quite that easy to get into the States, especially if you're White!

Kitty Bits Diane Oliver • Apr 25, 2020 at 11:45

Just do what the illegals do. Get a temporary work visa or a tourist visa and don't leave. I'll put you all up and you can stay indefinitely. It's when you do things legally like Mark has that you get thrown out when your spouse gets killed in the World Trade Center during the 9/11/01 attacks.
President Trump is the last great hope of America. If the leftists win we're going the way of Europe, and there's no place left to run, not that I can see, anyway. If the United States is going to be inundated with illegals we'd be better off if they were descendants of the Celts, the Picts, the Angles the Saxons, the Normans......... I guess England was diverse long before the elites facilitated an invasion from the middle east.

Diane Oliver Kitty Bits • Apr 26, 2020 at 04:27

Definitely Trump is the last great hope, not just for America but all the West. Perhaps one consequence of this WuFlu will be a big reduction in immigration, that would certainly help to keep the Dems out in 2024. Hope you and yours stay safe through this, I still don't know anyone who's had it.

Kitty Bits Diane Oliver • Apr 26, 2020 at 15:10

Nor do I, but the main stream media are chuntering on daily about the legions of the dead. I'm a nurse. Albeit I'm a visiting nurse who does palliative care, but none of my nurse friends have seen a single case of this virus either. The people near where I live who have died have mostly been very elderly nursing home patients. One person brought the virus into the nursing home and the elderly patients began to contract the virus and get pneumonia as a result. Anyone who dies having been exposed to the virus, even if they were dying of cancer or some other illness already is counted as a covid 19 death.
Looking at the situation from a distance it appears that the economic stability and future of the country is being sacrificed for the young in order to stave off death for the very old. I love elderly people, but we could protect them without ruining the futures of our children.

Diane Oliver Kitty Bits • Apr 27, 2020 at 05:34

It's the same here and in Europe, all deaths where someone dies with the virus is recorded as dying of it. It makes me wonder why, what is the benefit of racking up the death toll? It can only be for control, keep people scared (which many are) and they'll accept anything the government tells them. I think there is something sinister going on here and we need Mark to explain it, as I'm sure he can!

Kitty Bits Diane Oliver • Apr 27, 2020 at 12:24

Yes, I agree. I'm praying all will be exposed soon!

Matthew Wilson • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:11

Few children know about St. George and the dragon. How many are au fait with Shakespeare? Or the Great Reform Act of 1832. Or the Bill of Rights? Or Magna Carta Libertatum, to give it its full and august title? St. George is one of many bricks pulled from a very great tower.

Also, to give Kimberly Fortier (now Quinn) a fair hearing, when presented with the opportunity of illicitly liaising with a baggy-eyed blind man more than a dozen years your senior, what's a rich girl in authority supposed to do?

Fran Lavery Â • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:06

You go, Katie Hopkins! You make me proud. That took great guts to go to that protest to point out to the rest of us the intolerance those Paki men have for anyone's religion and existence besides their own. They are such filthy cowards and lowlife.

Wanda Sherratt • Apr 23, 2020 at 15:57

I discovered the Spectator back in the late '70s. I was attending UBC and I think I picked up a copy off the periodical stand in the main library, and was immediately hooked. I headed to the stacks and started spending my spare time reading the big bound copies of back issues, as the magazine couldn't produce new editions quickly enough to satisfy my appetite. Once I began working, I even bought a subscription, which I maintained into the 90s. I probably read Mark's stuff for the first time there, come to think of it.

There was so much great stuff in those pages. I remember a Pole named Radek Sikorski, describing his painstaking restoration of a dilapidated country house once he returned to his homeland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Later on, he became a minister of the Polish parliament! Some guy once made a genuine pilgrimage on foot from London to Santiago de Compostela, and wrote a weekly diary of the experience.

At the end of the magazine, there was a sort of competition/brainteaser column by someone called Jaspistos, who would post challenges to the readership, and present the winner with a prize the following week. One was "Take a book title and change one letter"; one of the winners was "Wein Kampf - The story of Hitler's heroic struggle against alcoholism". And one of my favorites, "Write a poem with the first line, 'Don't tell my father I breakfast on gin...'" I shall quote it now, from memory:

Don't tell my father I breakfast on gin,It's a terrible fault in a monk.In other respects I'm not troubled by sin,It's just getting out of my bunkThat causes my legs to feel wobbly and weak,My whole mental fibre to fail,Till I've had a small swig to restore my physique,And my mental control, which is frail.I stay in the chapel from Matins to Lauds,And work in the garden till Prime,I garden till Terce, I'm not one of those fraudsWho's half asleep most of the time.I supervise novices daily til Sext,Then, drawing on self-discipline,Illuminate Bede's or Erasmus's text,But I cannot get up without gin.

Matthew Wilson Wanda Sherratt • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:37

I went to the library some years ago, the biggest library in the whole state. I wanted to read about the upcoming election in the UK. 2017 it must have been. I couldn't find "The Spectator" anywhere in the place, so I approached the Help Desk. Upon being told that they didn't have "The Spectator" on file, incredulously I blurted out that it was the "oldest continuously-published periodical in the English language." "Wow, that's interesting," they told me. In the stacks they made room for "Soldier of Fortune"-lite and a mag dedicated to collecting Japanese googaws, though.

James Morphew Wanda Sherratt • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:45

Wanda, I had to copy that for future plagiarism. Thanks.

John Barrett Wanda Sherratt • Apr 24, 2020 at 07:27

Wanda,
Wonderful post! Never thought I'd read a humorous poem using the monastic hours - brings back memories - and now a laugh. Thanks.
John

Larry Gavin • Apr 23, 2020 at 15:54

Great stuff!

I saw this St Georges Day observation on a scurrilous anti BBC website......

'News from the BBC -Thursday 23rd April

St George didn't existIf he did exist he was a foreignerHe was a foreigner and a MoorBut he was the good brand of moorSo he was never a saintAnd his name wasn't GeorgeIn fact he was a sheShe has subject to domestic abuseThe dragon is domestic abuseDomestic abuse is badMen do domestic abuseMen are bad specially white ones

That's the BBC news â€“ now the weather for Ramadan ....'

Diane Oliver Larry Gavin • Apr 24, 2020 at 04:52

On St. George's Day the BBC devoted several minutes to a feature on Ramadan. St. George wasn't mentioned.

Owen Morgan • Apr 23, 2020 at 15:38

The attempt to foist regional assemblies on England was scandalous in many ways. The regions themselves would have been gerrymandered to bits. A referendum was announced for the North-east "region." John Prescott, the oafish minister in charge of trying to force the assemblies through, had recently changed the voting system, to permit postal votes in many more circumstances than had previously been accepted. It was a transparent attempt to rig votes, largely by appealing to the kind of patriarchal culture where the man of the house fills in all the voting forms for everyone in the house, including all thirty-two of his cousins in the attic (in Tower Hamlets, they really did get thirty-odd postal votes from the same one-room address).

Prescott chose to launch the regional assemblies in the North-east of England, because that was considered impregnable Labour territory. Labour had already changed the rules on the holding of referenda, to link public funding to parliamentary representation, which was a self-evidently meaningless equation in the context of a referendum. In the North-east, there were two "No" campaigns and Prescott himself decided which would get funding.

The second referendum was to be held in the North-west, but, on the very day of the North-east vote, the spokeswoman for the North-west's "Yes" campaign popped up on the BBC to say there was no need for a referendum in the North-west, since the idea of a regional assembly was so wildly popular there as to put the result beyond doubt. I suspect Prescott planned to use just such an argument to force through the remaining regional assemblies, once he had the intended result in the opening referendum.

Except that it didn't happen. The Cinderella "No" campaign, snubbed by Prescott, proved highly effective and the Geordies voted "No" by the kind of margin which even a Brexit Remoaniac would have struggled to argue with.

The "regions," incidentally, were originally a brainchild of Brussels, which wanted to see England disappear as a nation, although I think that the Brussels ones were even more contrived than Prescott's, with one combining parts of the south of England with the bits of France across the Channel.

Perry Pattetic Owen Morgan • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:06

I recall that, Owen. The French have been long trying to partition England back to the kingdoms that existed before King Alfred united them to create Englaland.

Larry Gavin Owen Morgan • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:09

Brilliant. Those shenanigans have been all but forgotten since the subsequent referendum dramas. And the media were wrong about that result also. Why do people still think the media are qualified to pronounce on Brexit and the current handling of the virus crisis?!

They have demonstrated more than once that they are not fit for purpose!

Larry Gavin Perry Pattetic • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:26

Got your spelling wrong.....it should be...Eng-er-land.

Mel • Apr 23, 2020 at 15:31

Around the turn of the century during my second ever trip to London I had a rather unfortunate and embarrassing run in with a paved road in Kensington and sought medical attention. As I walked in to the hospital I saw several women completely draped in black save their eyes. This type of dress struck me as creepy and intimidating. I was one of the few women not dressed this way. The doctor was Middle Eastern and for Â£100 told me to put Nivea on my facial lacerations. I learned later that the Saudi's had been using London as their summer home for some time.

Tom Osterman • Apr 23, 2020 at 15:25

With all respect to Miss Hopkins, what we're really up against is a domestic ruling class which enables the men trying to shout her down. But I'm still puzzled as to why that same ruling class expects to remain dominant over the men harassing Hopkins.

Wm. P. Tom Osterman • Apr 24, 2020 at 11:32

The difficulty in riding a tiger isn't at the start but at the finish.

Owen Morgan • Apr 23, 2020 at 15:08

The Scots have more in common with the English than they may care to acknowledge. As the Angles made their way across the island, there was no bloke in a kilt playing the bagpipes to deter them from going north, so they kept on going. Edinburgh belonged to Northumbria at one time and it has been said that one of the most common names in Lanarkshire, where Glasgow is, is John Smith - about as English as you can get.

I'd like to put in a word, too, for William Shakespeare, whose birthday was the 23rd of April (sadly, the date of his death, too). Technically, that was a different 23rd of April, since England used the Julian calendar in his day, but it's close enough. Meanwhile, in today's England, I hear people in the distance clapping the NHS, because that seems to be held up as the pinnacle of the nation's accomplishment now.

Larry Gavin Owen Morgan • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:14

Yes, Scots won't believe it.....but old English was spoken up there before Gaelic.

Robert Larry Gavin • Apr 23, 2020 at 22:56

Depends where in Scotland. English started off in a narrow corner in the South-East, around what's now Edinburgh.

Perry Pattetic • Apr 23, 2020 at 14:46

Do they teach anything before 1939 in England?

Larry Gavin Perry Pattetic • Apr 23, 2020 at 16:13

Not now. Apart from Henry 8th. There's no linear chronology either......thus negating the use of history.

Perry Pattetic Larry Gavin • Apr 23, 2020 at 20:51

If you don't know where you came from..Sad.

Wm. P. Perry Pattetic • Apr 24, 2020 at 11:37

From what I've gathered they don't really teach anything after then either.